Neverwinter First Impressions

Neverwinter is the spiritual successor of Neverwinter Nights, a fan favourite in the computer RPG genre. As an action MMO, it attempts to take the series in a different direction, and ramps of the action and the story to make an epic journey for players to embark upon. Lets take a couple of minutes to look at the first 20 levels, and my experience in game after about 12 hours of game time.

Listen now:

Combat is fun and responsive. The lack of tab targeting is a fun change, and players can destroy their opponents on the battlefield with fun animations and spell effects. No tab targetting does have some issues, and healing is where it’s most apparent. Finding a target in a group is a challenge that distracts from the gameplay. I’ve already mentioned several times my issues with the single target heals in Neverwinter, and in Open Beta this is still an issue.

Action is never far in Neverwinter. Questing is a rapid fire shot of adventure, whisking you from location to location as you battle orcs, bandits and the undead. The quests seem to have a great story to them, but I was rushing through the game so much that I missed most of it. I did catch enough of the story by R.A. Salvatore to know that I’m going to go through it again at a much slower pace with another character.

I also jumped into a few skirmishes, encouraged by some quests I picked up, and got another quick jolt of action, fighting through some quick waves based battles to earn some loot and XP. The ruined neighbourhoods of Neverwinter lend themselves well to these fights to the death. While group based, these Skirmishes tended to devolve into chaotic messes where everyone was taking on large groups without worrying about what the rest of their group was doing.

Looking for something a little more structure, I ran the Cloak Tower dungeon again. You can find a video of a run through from one of the Beta Weekends on our Youtube channel. Nothing much has changed with the structure or the mechanics of the dungeon, and I enjoyed myself. Once again, however, there wasn’t much need for any sort of strategy. I don’t know if it’s because we’re still fairly low level, or because most of us had played in Beta, but both runs that I managed to fit in followed the same pattern of zerg and kill.

The crafting is very reminiscent of Star Wars: The Old Republic, with minions that you send off on missions (some of these early ones taking as much as 6 hours) but with the addition of being able to complete them immediately for the cost of in-game currency. I’ll talk about this in more detail in the full review, but so far, it’s working very well.

The game is a ton of fun, and I feel myself looking forward to my play time. The fact that this is free-to-play is a bonus, as I would gladly pay money for the opportunity to play Neverwinter. As to the question of the founders packs, this is a personal decision for everyone. What I can say is that I don’t feel that any of the items that you receive in the pack (such as an exclusive race, the drow; mounts and more) are useless. The choice comes down to the value that you put on the in-game conveniences that you get.

Should you go check it out? Most definitely! The price is right, the game is fun, and you’ll yourself sitting down for a quick play session and suddenly wondering where the last 4 hours have gone.

I’m playing as Almazar the Devoted Cleric in game. Feel free to say “Hi!” if you decide to check it out.

Enjoyed the review, it mirrored my thoughts on NW in many ways. I especially enjoyed the part about losing yourself in-game – sitting down to play, and then coming up for air hours later – as I had the same problem in the second and third closed betas (the only two I played in).

Chris

Make sure to check it out in Open Beta. They’ve made some great changes to the game since the beta weekends, especially in the “quality of life” areas like crafting.

Founder’s pack is overpriced as hell. Guardian is ok. There’s not a whole lot of people that will pay 200 bucks for digital content only – if they offered a CE of sorts with physical trinkets in that price along all the digital stuff you get it might be worth it. The f2p model needs a bit of tweaking too i think. Some things are too expensive like keys to the chests as the drop rate on chests is terribly low – 10 chests for me yielded 1 purple item – enchantment rest was all greens. Then again you have some things that are reasonably priced like mounts and companions. Crafting is nice as it’s pretty much a ripoff from SWTOR and that was a nice system. Rest is fun, some things are missing still but they said clearly that they will be adding the content like classes, prestige classes, etc. That’s what all DD players love and if they manage to do them well they’ll be able to cash in nicely on character slots as the default amount is ridiculous (2) and the Guardian pack gives you whole 3 (@20 bucks price for the pack).

To me, its way too easy, one-way pointing hack n slash. While I played the original NWN which was tremendously more challenging at the beginning, (mustve been the mod, hello RR), this game is just click heal click click repeat repeat more quests that involve run and kill. Whilst Ill be giving this alot more hours, the first impression is like war in the north combined with TOR and WoW.

Elethien

While the game is guite easy in the beginning, it really only gets harder and harder as you progress, without too many big spikes in difficulty. As I didn’t die until about level 30, I’ve died quite alot from there on and out playing as a Devoted Cleric.

My suggestion? Try some Foundry quests. Even when I’m breezing through official content, the Foundry has a surprising habit of kicking my butt.

Time2Kill

I am loving this game. Very addictive.

allnutty

I would disagree that this is a “spiritual successor” to Neverwinter Nights. It’s just based in the same setting. Just like Knights of the old republic was not a spiritual successor to any other starwars game.

Drax Smallwood

This game is so much fun, I can’t go back to any other mmo after playing it. Seriously. it’s just FUN.

Kewlbuttz

The combat is essentially “roll face across keyboard”, even though all the glitter and fluff makes it look and feel like you’re doing a lot more. You do feel powerful, but this feeling starts to fade as the combat’s simplicity becomes more and more evident. The UI is fairly inaccessible, and doesn’t feel natural (using the alt key to unlock the mouse and having it freeze the game is unnatural feeling). Instances still have their problems, such as imbalanced team comps and the fact that when I’m in a party with a friend, we’re forced into a party with the other instance members after the instance is over, or we’re tossed into different instances of the city we were in.

There are a lot of nuisances in NW that will hopefully be fixed during open beta, but open beta won’t save it from its biggest problem: its far too mindless. I thought WoW dungeons were a joke, and this is a whole new level.

However, the Foundry is the only saving grace of NW. The foundry quests can be involving and beautifully told. They feel like an actual campaign, instead of the watered down “kill all this stuff and get this other stuff” errands Cryptic made.